New NVIDIA GPU Server

Up to this point, I have been doing ALL of my AI work (development, testing, et al) on a Dell T1700 server. These little servers are absolutely amazing well-built workhorses and you can push them to the limit. I had 16G RAM in mine, with 4 cores on an single socket i5-4690 chip running at 3.50GHz. No decent graphic card for AI or floating point operations.

I could do a lot with this server, but things took a lot of time and would saturate the box, especially if you didn't limit cores, or pin cores, etc. It was fine for learning - to a point. I did a lot of programming for Fintech models, applying so many topics (that can be found deeper in this blog). 

When I decided to un-mothball one model in particular, and take it in a different direction and build a usable app, I realized I needed to start calling out to web-hosted models.

Then my son, who was doing extended travel, gave me a gaming server he had. This server is one of these Microcenter-like build-to-order boxes, it isn't a major brand like Dell.  It has, like the Dell T1700, 16G RAM. But it is a significant upgrade on compute power. 

GPU
First and foremost, this server, unlike the T1700 from Dell, has a GPU in it:

RTX 3060 Ti — 8GB GDDR6, NVIDIA GA104 chip, 200W TDP. Driver 595.84, CUDA 13.2.

Chipset
The chipset is 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-12700F with a single socket, 12 cores per socket. It says 2 threads. But in htop I only see 20 threads. Why?

Well...the i7-12700F is an Alder Lake hybrid chip, and that's the gotcha:
- 8 P-cores (performance) × hyperthreading = 16 threads
- 4 E-cores (efficiency) × no hyperthreading = 4 threads
- Total: 12 cores, 20 threads

E-cores don't support SMT/HT — that's why it's 20, not 24. The "12 cores × 2 = 24" math only works if all 12 cores are P-cores. It's not a reservation; the silicon just doesn't have the second thread on those 4 small cores.

Which 20 one sees in htop depends on enumeration — usually P-cores (0–15) come first, then E-cores (16–19), but variations exist. To see exactly which is which, lscpu -e lists core IDs and which threads share a core.